Museum Night 010 2016

A diverse collection of museums and cultural initiatives in Rotterdam open their doors on Saturday night 5 March, from 20:00 till 01:00.

5

Mar 2016

-

6

Mar 2016

20:00 to
01:00

During the Museum Night 010 2016 V2_ will present Exhausting a Crowd - the Netherlands by American artist Kyle McDonald.

Exhausting a Crowd – Netherlands (2015) brings together our respective fascinations with surveillance and online public commentary. The project is inspired by a 60-page piece of experimental literature by Georges Perec entitled “An Attempt at Exhausting a Place in Paris,” which he wrote on a bench over three days in 1974. In the text, Perec studies the mundane crowd with empirical discipline and takes down notes, brief
lists and descriptive reports. Likewise, Kyle McDonald is interested in
the actions of random passersby and invites the public to visit the
website www.exhaustingacrowd.com to write down their comments on the
online surveillance footage streamed there. Unlike a park bench,
however, the Web is no place for silent contemplation. In contrast to
Perec’s meticulous work, the commentary of an online audience quickly
mutates into a distracted haiku. The comments are brief, and the overall
result depicts a strange dynamic between personal intention, chaos and
serendipity. For the digital native, a taste for surveillance is no
longer an ethical issue but rather a source of entertainment.

Coproduced by De Brakke Grond, IDFA DocLab and V2_. First commissioned
by the Victoria and Albert Museum on the occasion of the exhibition All
of this Belongs to You. Design and website developed in collaboration
with Jonas Jongejan. Video by Daan Kuys.